Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter) 1993
Rodgers, Joan R., and John L. Rodgers. 1993. "Chronic Poverty in the United States." Journal of Human Resources 28(1):25-54.
This paper proposes a method of measuring chronic and transitory poverty using an axiomatically sound, additively decomposable index of aggregate poverty. Our approach is contrasted with alternative methods of measuring poverty persistence. We use our method to measure chronic and transitory poverty in the United States during the 1980s and late 1970s and find that chronic poverty is a more serious problem than previously thought. Between the late 1970s and mid 1980s poverty not only increased, it became more chronic and less transitory in nature. This is true for the population as a whole and for some, but not all, of the subpopulations we considered. The latter were defined according to race, type of social unit, and educational qualifications of the head of the social unit. All empirical analyses are based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
The authors are professors of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. They would like to thank Ken Koford, Chris Ruhm, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments and staff of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan for technical advice. This research was supported in part by a Fellowship from the Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in May 1993 through May 1996 from the authors at the following address: Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC 27412.
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